Brilliantly conceived and competently executed.

The hero (played with the right amount of adolescent insouciance by Max Riemelt) is a working-class boy admitted to one of the academies for his formidable boxing skills, and through him director Dennis Gansel captures the ordinariness of Hitler's supporters.

The ethereal private moments and inspired passages are beautifully shot by Jean-Marie Dreujou, but Dai never quite organizes the material dramatically, and the tone is too often jagged and disruptive.

Director Oliver Schmitz is particularly attentive to the superstition and ingrained sexism that make life miserable for these people, though he also seems to view women as the country's best hope.

The English cast is fun; but this is more spectacle than story, and the Steve Kloves script deserves better handling than director Chris Columbus -- plus any number of studio deliberators -- gave it.

Actor David Morse establishes himself as a truly formidable presence in this powerful first feature by Alex and Andrew Smith.

Fortunately, the script by Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow isn't half bad, and both Barry Levinson's direction and the performances are agreeably restrained.

This video profile by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller allows his significance to register and his charisma to shine despite a pedestrian approach that's especially awkward in its use of archival footage.

The actors are brilliant, the dialogue extremely clever, and the direction assured. But by the end I couldn't have cared less about any of the characters.

Darkly poetic study of psychological brutality.

Slick and often funny, but the smugness of the satire and the stunted emotions are finally wearying.

Peter Bogdanovich used Gazzara in a similar part in Saint Jack (1979), but as good as that film is, it doesn't catch the exquisite warmth and delicacy of feeling of Cassavetes's doom-ridden comedy-drama.

The movie’s worth checking out for its collision of musical sensibilities, featuring the first screen performance by the Runaways’ Cherie Currie and an original score by disco kingpin Giorgio Moroder.

Searing drama that uses the police procedural to explore the moral and psychological devastation of the Iraq war for U.S. soldiers (and, incidentally, for Iraqi citizens).

A strong cast fails to rescue this ponderous Oscar bait.

Canadian-made unpleasantness (1975) about a psychopath stalking a college town. Bob Clark's direction is enthusiastic but sloppy-a presaging of his later Porky's. [02 Dec 2010, p.52]

This uplifting documentary breaks no new ground stylistically, but the story it tells is urgent and compelling.

The wit is too weak to sustain a film, and the songs all sound the same.

By the time director Patrice Leconte arrives at his predictable climax and conventional moral, this lethargic French comedy may not have any friends either.

They've hit a fatal snag. The feature they selected happens to be a pretty good one -- certainly much better than Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie by just about any criterion one could think of.

Howard Hawks’s only attempt at a wide-screen blockbuster (1955), much disparaged afterward by Hawks and many others, is actually fairly awesome if you can get beyond the clunky dialogue (some of it written by William Faulkner, as well as Harry Kurnitz) and the campy evilness of the Joan Collins character.

Survivors of the 70s may find their memories stirred by tales of cruising Studio 54 and the Saint, of abandoned piers and empty Allied vans; younger viewers may be fascinated by the contrast between these balding middle-aged men and their black-and-white snapshots, showing them in tight jeans, flannel shirts, long hair, and Zapata mustaches.

The story, from a book by Daniel Mannix, was Disney's best material in a decade or two, the stuff of rending family melodrama on the order of Dumbo or Lady and the Tramp. Unfortunately, the execution is only adequate: the character work relies too much on celebrity voices (as was Disney's habit in the dark 60s) and the whole film has a sketchy, underpopulated feel that hardly represents Disney at the studio's baroque best.

Conceived like a sports movie, this delivers passion, nuance, and historical insight along with unnecessary hokum.

Writer-director Marcos Bernstein is more interested in how a melodramatic imagination can distort reality, a concept he explores with charm and tact.

Brian De Palma dedicates this 1983 feature to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, authors of the 1932 original, though I doubt they would find much honor in his gory inflation of their crisp, 90-minute comic nightmare into a klumbering, self-important, arrhythmic downer of nearly three hours.

Witty, satisfying, and a terrific showcase for the radiant Bening.

If you're looking to be romantically captivated, this movie just might do the job.